Career Change Advisor

Hi, my name is Paul, married with three children, residing in Jakarta, the capital city of Indonesia. My own struggle for pursuing a perfect career inspired me, career change advisor, to build this website.

Job positions were not a problem for me. I was used to have good positions with my employers. But at my late thirty I began to find it difficult to enjoy my job; I badly wanted a new career.

However, financial security, social status and any other humanly possible reasons held me back from making a career switch. I did take no action until I was at my early forty. To make matters worse, the career change idea faced serious objections from my wife.

How could a person with a good career and generous financial rewards want a new, uncertain career? Family and close friends who knew my plan discouraged me to go with it and suggested that I looked for another job instead. There was almost no support for the radical career change idea.

You can have everything in life that you want if you just give enough other people what they want. – Zig Ziglar

How I Found My New Career

Early in 2002 I realized that I badly wanted a way out. Using many career tests and self assessments I finally discovered that my passion was all about entrepreneurship. In fact, it revealed my admiration to the big name of entrepreneurs and their unique personalities.

Another influential thought was the idea of “knowledge worker” of the late Peter Drucker, who is probably the greatest management guru of the 20th century. I wasn’t sure when he predicted that knowledge workers would become a trend. But what inspired me was that the knowledge workers could work anytime and anywhere in the world.

The idea of pursuing an entrepreneur career and having the lifestyle of a knowledge worker was my starting point. Believe me, this was not an easy discovery as for years I didn’t know my real strengths. It was actually an “eureka” moment when I had almost given up and decided to stay with my last job.

In November 2002 I began searching for a side business to start. Since I had to work long and unpredictable working hours, I scheduled my weekend for writing a business plan draft. I called it a draft because I actually had no idea about a business that suited me best to start.

As my passion is entrepreneurship, at first I wanted to publish a magazine catering to entrepreneurs. It didn’t last long… I quickly realized that it would need a huge investment upfront and I wouldn’t be earning a living as a publisher any time soon.

After long sleepless night studying various resources I finally got an online business idea, which I could pursue as a part-time work from home. Could the Internet be the perfect place for knowledge workers?

My Career Choice

My problem with the new career idea was that I knew nothing about web business and as my target audiences are English speaking audiences I didn’t feel comfortable with my English proficiency. My wife also considered the risks of failures and uncertainties of monthly incomes from the new career as real threats.

Only after two nights of contemplating the idea I was able to make up my mind: this was the career I wanted to have! I didn’t want to look back and I had to burn the bridges fast…

That was how I started my online career without leaving my job or reducing my monthly income. I took my first step by buying online internet business courses. After about a year almost doing nothing but reading many internet marketing courses until I finally built this site.

The Solution

While searching for a good business idea I stumbled upon SBI. SBI or “Site Build It” helps me build a lucrative online business. I knew this internet business solution from an e-book that I bought for $17 (now it’s available for free).

I started the very website you are on now in August 2003, when I knew nothing about the Internet and web publishing. SBI had helped prepare me to build a profitable business, before I jumped into building my site. As a newbie, my learning curve was shorter. In fact, in less than 8 months it started to make money.

In the beginning SBI had required me to do a lot of work but it did change my life. In December 2005, when my online income reached my monthly income target and I had enough savings to cover more than twelve months of my family’s monthly expenses, I said goodbye to my boss and quit my job.